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This is a follow-up to my report that following advice here I’d been able to get past the install freeze. My MacBook Pro 2012 was painfully slow booting up and with any operation involving the Finder. I tried switching off Spotlight indexing and gave it a couple of days to sort itself out, but to no avail. I tried various suggestions regarding resets, deleting various cache files, etc. and it ended up worse. Unusable. I then tried a reinstall of Catalina, thinking if that didn’t resolve things I’d do a clean install. It ran the install with no problems and is currently operating as well as under Mojave.

This is still an issue with Catalina 10.15.7 I tried the Apple support solution of running the disk utility after rebooting with Cmd-R, but that didn’t appear to do anything. The only error disk utility gave was the disk was unmounted, which is presumably to be expected as it was running from the repair sector.  I then rebooted with Cmd-R again and followed kimonp’s method. I stuck a post it on the screen to mark where the progress bar had stopped and saw it creeping slowly along. The screen then blacked out. Pressing shift to wake it up did nothing. I left it for a while and came back to power down, but before doing so found it woke up to show me the Catalina screen image and my login icons.  I logged in then had endlessly spinning wheels: onscreen and for the cursor. After a while the cursor returned to normal, but it was 2 hours before the onscreen spinning stopped and the setup screen appeared.  I clicked through the first few setup items then when it said it was setting up my Mac, I had a black screen and cursor again for 30 minutes. Finally, I was in. I did a restart into recovery mode, as suggested, to restart security.  It now takes many minutes to start up, but appears to be working okay. It is also very slow, presumably as it is indexing things. At least I can now download iMovie from the App Store, which is why I was forced to do this upgrade in the first place. My laptop is a 2012 MacBook Pro and cannot run Big Sur, the more recent OS upgrade.